Sunday, December 11, 2011

As some of you may be aware, in Thousand Suns, I sometimes use words and phrases from the constructed language of Esperanto as stand-ins for the futuristic universal human language of Lingua Terra (a name cribbed from H. Beam Piper). This not only felt "right," since a lot of Golden Age SF uses Esperanto in a similar fashion, but was fun, too, since I've had a strange fascination with Esperanto since I was a teenager.

Anyway, I recently came across references to a translation of Burroughs's A Princess of Mars into Esperanto, the cover for which I've reproduced below. I'd love to find a copy of it somewhere, though I wouldn't actually be able to read it, since, despite my interest in the language, I'm far from being fluent in it. Still, I thought it was kind of cool.

Have you seen the horror film Incubus (1966) starring William Shatner and spoken entirely in Esperanto? Strangely good and filmed just before Star Trek started; it could almost be an episode where Kirk is lost on some strange planet...

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